Paul Ryan has responded to a David Brooks column that had in turn took issue with an op-ed co-written by Ryan and AEI president Arthur Brooks on the decision facing America between an opportunity society, where the government promotes a vibrant free enterprise system and sturdy safety net v. an expanding social welfare state  one where the government assumes greater control of more sectors of the economy and more aspects of our lives.

-snip-

Ryans response  a concise defense of his Roadmap for Americas Future  is excellent, as youd expect. Heres a taste:

The challenge goes beyond the current concentration of power in Washington, which Brooks rightly opposes. For the record, I first introduced A Roadmap for Americas Future when President George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office. The explosion in government spending and overreach has been a bipartisan failure, not for years but for decades. Politicians continued to make promises that simply cannot be kept. But reaping comes after sowing  and we now face a debt so massive that it will cause, sooner than we think, the collapse of our social safety net. Contrary to David Brooks assertion, simply getting government out of the way is not our prescription to meet our pressing fiscal and economic challenges.

And, have you ever heard Ryan "spew a bunch of nonsense", about anything but especially about matters of finance?

People are free to disagree with his policy positions, but even media talking heads will (reluctantly) say that Ryan is perhaps without equal with respect to subject-matter understanding and eloquence on government finance.

Ryan makes it clear he is on board with unconstitutional welfare state, socialist spending - SS, Medicare, and Medicaid. So, we get to choose between a large unconsitutional welfare state and a slightly smaller one. Ryan takes the R party back to the days of Bob Michael - “Vote for us! We’ll do the same things, only more responsibly.”

Boy, am I ever excited about Paul Ryan and the rest of the useless R’s in DC.

11
posted on 09/15/2010 7:47:00 PM PDT
by achilles2000
("I'll agree to save the whales as long as we can deport the liberals")

Brooks was born in Toronto and grew up in New York City in Stuyvesant Town. He graduated from Radnor High School (located in a Main Line suburb of Philadelphia) in 1979. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983 with a degree in history.[1]

He wrote a book of cultural commentary titled Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, published in 2000, and followed it four years later with On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.

Brooks was a visiting professor of public policy at Duke University’s Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, and he taught an undergraduate seminar there in the fall of 2006.[3]

"Ryan was outstanding on Charlie Rose last night (watching Charlie Rose was a complete accident)."

Yes, I watched it. He was excellent. The video is up at CharlieRose.org if anyone wants to watch it.

I watch Rose most every night. I actually enjoy it - primarily for five reasons 1) There are no commercials, 2) There is no screaming, 3) There are no obnoxious screen graphics, 4) It's usually an intelligent conversation and 5) He has interesting guests other than political people, like physicists, doctors and other scientist, museum curators and foreign leaders.

My only complaint is Rose very rarely has orthodox conservatives on. This was only Ryan's second appearance, but I bet Wasserman-Schultz has been on more than a dozen times. Also, the only time Rose comes close to being combative, is when conservatives are on. He had Haley Barbour on a couple years ago, and things got as combative as they get (which really isn't all that combative). Naturally, Barbour ruled.

As Paul Ryan so cogengtly states inThe Choice Before Tomorrow: As the budgets ominous trajectory makes clear, by asking government to do everything, it will, in the end, barely be able to do anything.

This is, in a nutshell, the competent and benevolent conservative's argument against the competent and benevolent socialst (of which there are arguably none in the US, but there are, arguably, competent and benevolent socialists in Europe). The argument is, quite simply, that resources are scarce and there is a limit to what can be alloted to each person on earth. Therefore, let each person earn his own allotment and let each person dispose of that to meet his needs as he sees fit. That is a much better solution than attempting as a matter of policy to determine ahead of time what each person's needs will be and to make the allocations, with a bureaucracy showing Parkinsonian growth, taking an ever larger middle-man's cut off the top. As it turns out, in the US at least, resources are not sufficient to meet the promies and therefore no one's needs are met anywhere. We collect enormous quantities of money for education, but education is poort because of the imperatives of the educational bureaucracy, which is an ominous portent for universal feral gubmint run health care.

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